Thursday, March 20, 2014

OXENBLOOD’S CYCLOPEDIUM OF AUSTRALIA, 1931

Builds week by week into a treasury of
wonderment

Platypus, or Duckbilled Platypus

The Platypus has a short, thick trunk and
short, powerful limbs for swimming. A full-grown male is two-feet long, a
female (or Platypusse) is 19 inches. The whole surface, save for the bill and
feet, is covered in a coat of velvety fur; the snout and upper jaw are
developed into a structure roughly resembling the bill of a duck.

The
credible, ill-educated or ‘new chum’ reader might wonder why, if all this is
so, he has never seen a platypus in life. Why can he not keep one as a pet,
obtain a stuffed one as a toy for his children, or go hunting for platypi and
come home with the makings of a tasty ‘plate o’ pie’ at night? The answer is,
of course, simple: the ‘platypus’ was one of the most elaborate hoaxes of the
18th century, a contrivance so skillful that many even in modern
times still believe it to be a real animal, in the face of the blasphemous
absurdity of the concept.

Sir
Joseph Banks, botanist on the Endeavour and friend to Lord Sandwich, was
compelled to spend large stretches at sea with no-one to talk to but Captain
Cook, whose only topic of conversation was the intricacies of navigation. Banks
found himself ‘so unutterably bored’, according to his diaries of August 1769,
that he decided to ‘cobble together’ a practical joke animal that would ‘really
put the wind up’ his fellow countrymen who, once in the southern hemisphere, he
had come to regard as ‘just a bunch of flaming ratbag poms’. His expose of the
affair, published in 1775 as What’s Been
Did and What’s Been Hid, recounts how, after stitching together some parts
of a cabin boy’s dinner – a large rat and a duck head – he decided no-one would
be fooled by the result, and put the ‘specimen’ to one side. On returning to
Plymouth, however, Lord Sandwich, coming on board to welcome Banks, spied the
fraudulent collage and assumed it to be ‘one of the wondrous creatures you
found, Jojo’. Banks, his fondness for Sandwich overwhelming, collaborated in
the lie to the point of putting his hand in the unsewn end of the model and
making it wave ‘hello’ to Sandwich. He would later come to regret this
deception when, after dying in 1820, he quickly went to Hell.